Goal & Purpose

We created an interview protocol to talk with 5 Purdue students about their experience using Purdue OWL and the Writing Lab.

What We Targeted

• The confusion students have when identifying key differences between the OWL and Writing Lab.

Key Questions

• Have you ever looked for help at the Writing Lab? Why/Why not?

• What kind of help would you expect to get when visiting the Writing Lab?

We also included an interactive portion where we shared the Purdue OWL’s home page and asked our interviewees where they would imagine things to be located on the website, with the options being either The Purdue OWL or The Purdue Writing Lab. We asked where they would expect to find APA citations, a place to set up an appointment, thesis and dissertation examples, and information about writing instructors.

Significant Findings

• Students were unaware of the writing lab chat bot

• There was too much to read on website

• There is a major learning curve when using the site navigation

Students said they primarily use the OWL as a citation resource. Interviewees stated that if they were to get writing assistance they would want help with starting papers, looking over finished papers for larger edits, grammar, and help on specific parts of an essay such as writing a conclusion or thesis; but only one of them had been to the writing lab. There is initial confusion between how the Writing Lab differs from the OWL and where to find what they are looking for on the website.

Reasons why students don’t go to the Writing Lab

• Only sees the writing lab as a resource for English-related classes

• Doesn’t feel like they do enough long-form writing to warrant getting help

• Doesn’t think major specific writing help is offered at the Writing Lab

Goal and Purpose

We did another round of interviews, but this time with 4 Writing Lab student staff members. Our goal in doing this was to learn more about the types of questions they get from students seeking writing help and how much traffic they get.

Key Questions

Here are just a few of the key questions that we asked in our interviews:

• When students come to you for help, what do they usually need help with?

• How often do people ask for help?

• What is your typical experience with the chatbot on the writing lab site?

Significant Findings

The writing lab tutors go through a lot of training on developing their empathy and how to build the confidence of the students who come to the writing lab for help before they have one-on-one meetings. The staff expressed an annoyance that students weren’t aware of all they offer and that they are there more than just grammar editors.

The tutors say that they see both undergrads and graduate students meet with them, but they noticed that graduates tend to want more typical tutoring help and undergrads mostly want a second opinion on their work. One tutor noted that they think this is because graduates are more confident in their ability while undergrads are more unsure when it comes to understanding and feeling like they answered their writing prompt.

Many tutors brought up the fact that not all the students know that they can schedule a time slot for longer than 25-30 minutes. One of our interviewees noted that students typically pick a specific tutor that they like and have used before when scheduling, which we view as a potential opportunity to humanize the tutors in the eyes of the students and display areas they specialize in. We also asked what types of online communication forums they prefer for sessions, and they overwhelmingly disliked using chat features to try and get their complex ideas across and to understand where to student is coming from.

We looked through the online writing lab sites of other major universities, focusing on the structure and information included on the websites, specifically looking for where resources were missing on the OWL’s site.

SITE NAVIGATION

• The Harvard and University of Texas websites have navigations that break down the major resources into simple groupings such as “The Writing Process,” “Improving Your Writing Style,” and “Presentations”. By sorting the tabs into general ideas, instead of multiple specific tabs, the website looks cleaner, provides a less overwhelming experience and more efficient experience for users.

Meet the Tutors Page

• Some sites included an about page for their tutors, which helps highlight the individual abilities of each tutor and helps the viewer gain a deeper understanding of what help they can ask for when coming in for a tutoring session.

About Page

• The Duke and University of Wisconsin websites both included a “What to Expect” section. One main issue we noticed with the distinction between the OWL and the Writing Lab was that Purdue students are unaware of what resources the Writing Lab provides, which causes them to completely disregard the Writing Lab as a resource when they are in need of help. The inclusion of a description of what the Writing Lab offers helps with that confusion.

Goal

With this content audit our goal was to identify specific areas for improvement on the Purdue OWL homepage and Writing Lab homepage.

How

We created “critique categories” that we specifically wanted to look at on both websites. The categories were layout, language of content, icons, cognitive load (how much information was being thrown at the person as one given point), and content hierarchy.

Purdue OWL Homepage

• Users can’t identify which links will take them to OWL vs the Writing Lab

• Resources at the bottom should be sectioned by Writing Lab popular resources and OWL popular resources

• Homepage consists of links to another different OWL page

Writing Lab Homepage

• Contact information is redundant and inconsistent

• Scheduling tool link should be consolidated to one place and WCO should be explained

• Mission statement needs to be shortened as students tend to avoid big groupings of text when scanning a page

• Content hierarchy/prioritization could be improved

Goal & Purpose

Through talking to our sponsor and the writing lab staff, we learned that tutors who do not have traditional english sounding names have a lower likelihood of being booked for tutoring sessions, even if they are the best tutors at the writing lab. We wanted to explore what we can implement onto the website that could address this trend.

Takeaways

• Testimonials, references, and reviews may serve as signals of reliability because they may pertain to a user’s general character and reputation.

• Some platforms encourage or require users to disclose personal information about themselves that fills them out as people, even if such information is not directly germane to the substance of the transaction.

• The disclosure of additional information about a user may serve to mitigate bias. Information that leads others to see a user as a “whole person” might lead them to rely less on discrete signals (gender, ethnicity, etc.)

• Profiles may provide opportunities to signal counter-stereotypical information that may mitigate biases based on protected characteristics.

• A study found that hosts with longer profiles and who discuss more topics in their profiles are perceived as more trustworthy, and that such perceived trustworthiness can influence guests’ choices in deciding with whom to stay. (AirBnB)